


Force of Nature: Fire

by Jenna Hilary Sinclair (JennaHilary)



Series: Force of Nature [5]
Category: Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Genre: Alternate Reality, Force of Nature, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-05
Updated: 2014-11-05
Packaged: 2018-02-24 05:40:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2570186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JennaHilary/pseuds/Jenna%20Hilary%20Sinclair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fire is the third novel in a trilogy of Brokeback Mountain-inspired novels. Earthquake is the first novel, Storm is the second novel, and they are posted both on the Archive of Our Own and on my Live Journal: jenna_hilary.livejournal.com. Each novel follows directly from the events of the previous novel, with only a few days between them. Readers should dive into Earthquake first before they pick up Storm, and they should read Storm before they read Fire.</p>
<p>    The year is 1984. Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar have moved together to Eagle Nest, New Mexico. Jack has a job at a cattle feedlot, Ennis is foreman at a small horse ranch, and Ennis trains problem horses in the pasture behind their leased house. Here, in the twenty-first year of their tumultuous relationship, Jack and Ennis learn how to live together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Force of Nature: Fire

**Author's Note:**

> NOTE: Since AO3 doesn't seem to allow posting of a prologue, I will add to this post when I am ready to put chapter one up. That way both the Prologue and Chapter One will appear together. If anybody knows how to set this up to accept a Prologue completely on its own, and labeled as Prologue and not Chapter One, please let me know at Hilary54@aol.com. Thanks!
> 
> Posting Frequency: I don't know! I will write the chapters, which tend to be quite long, and post them when they are ready to go. At least a few weeks between chapters, I think. Thanks for your patience.   
> Yours,  
> Jenna

PROLOGUE: LOOKOUT POINT

FLOYD: BLESSINGS

A few afternoons ago, Rocky asked me to deliver a three-year-old filly he’d sold. She was going to a ranch over by Questa. The chestnut was one of Ennis’s projects, and a pretty penny Rocky got for her too. Ennis does good work, you know? She was well-behaved. 

Ennis still isn’t back on the job since the lightning got him, poor guy. If I know him, and I sort of do, it must be driving him crazy. Anyway, Rocky was busy, so he couldn’t ask anybody else but me to drive for the delivery. I’m strong even if I am seventy-one, and I can still do any man’s job in northern New Mexico. But it is true that I’m trying to cut back on my time behind the wheel until I can get cataract surgery this winter. Even so, I said sure, I could do it. I just needed to be careful. All of us at the ranch have had to take on a little extra these past few weeks. It’s no problem. You’d do the same for friends. 

It was a glorious day, an early November breath-stealer with the sun shining a golden autumn yellow, not too warm, not too cold yet. I whistled as I drove. It seemed everything in the world was in balance and nothing could go wrong. God knows, we need more days like that. 

It was too late to go back to the ranch after the filly’s new owners took over, so I visited Violeta, my lovely friend who’d had heart surgery back in the spring. We sipped sweet tea on her porch and watched the last, most stubborn aspen leaves flutter as they resisted finally falling to the earth. Violeta, she’s easy to be with. She’s doing so much better, and her smile was completely free of pain. The time I had spent caretaking her, right before I started work at the Buckminster ranch, was worth every minute. I’d do it again. Violeta is enough to make me think thoughts I haven’t thought in many a year ... and I do a lot of thinking!

Then I drove a little farther south to Maudie’s to pick up an early dinner-to-go. We fell into conversation, that cantankerous old woman and me. I know Maudie from way back, from when she first found the valley, or maybe from when the valley found her, the way it happens. She was a cantankerous middle-aged woman then. But everybody’s used to her and her sharp ways. It wouldn’t be her if she didn’t come at you with an insult or a complaint. One time we were talking about foods from when we were kids, and I told her my mom practically raised me on her family’s traditional Navajo tacos, with the most delicious frybread. Maudie scoffed and called them junk food that wouldn’t fill up a working man, but the next week there they were on the menu. She’ll never admit she makes them mainly for me.

It was a little out of my way, but not all that much, so then I set my truck to Ennis’s place where he lives with Jack. My little Ranger pickup knows the way practically without me driving. For sure Ennis never imagined that would happen! My, how times have changed. Now when I pull up and he sees me, that tight-lipped secret-keeper doesn’t even have a look of panic in his eyes. I mean no harm. I’ve learned to leave no harm in my wake.

Truthfully, though, I think he was happy to see me. It must get boring for him, not being able to work or drive while he recovers. We visited for a while and went down to his stable together. He tried to prove he was about ready to go back to work, but it’s not me he has to convince. The sun started to set, and I kept a hand on his elbow when we walked back, explaining about my eyes and how I was being extra cautious with them. He stumbled once, cursed Goddamnit, and told me it was because of a dip in the ground and not his leg, because that was just fine. I told him it was a good thing we were holding on to each other. He gave me a funny look then, but I just laughed at him. 

Then Jack drove up and got out of the truck with that big smile he has. I think he was home earlier than usual, and if I was a detective, really paying attention, I could tell they both appreciated that. Anyway, Jack’s gotten more used to me being around, helping out, than he was when their bad luck first started. I was happy to shake his hand, even though I’m not always sure I’m reading him right. Don’t get me wrong, I like Jack. He’s my kind of man, easy to slip into talk with and easy to be with. He gives the impression that life is blue skies and he has no problems. 

But I know that’s not so. Just look at what he’s trying to do with Ennis out here in the ranchland and not in Taos, living and not hiding. Maybe that’s the reason for the tension I sometimes see in him, in the layers under the good feelings. I couldn’t blame him if it is. Or it could be something else. I can’t pretend to know the man. Betty Jo tells me that Ennis and Jack have known each other a long time, for years, but under hard circumstances that kept them apart. That could wear on anybody.

Whatever the reason for him to pretend everything’s just fine, I’m sure the surface-Jack I know isn’t really who Jack is. There’s more to him. I wonder how long it will be before he lets me in, or if he ever will. 

They’re quite a pair. They’ve added the spice of mystery to my life in the valley. I really do wonder what their story is.

As we stood outside in the fading light, there was a pause in the conversation. Jack looked at Ennis for a second or two, and then he asked me if I wanted to stay for supper. 

I get the feeling I’m one of the very few people who has ever sat at their kitchen table with them, breaking bread. Done it a few times now. When I said my own grace before unwrapping the taco from Maudie’s, Jack sort of snorted. I don’t think he’s religious. Ennis watched me like he was the sphinx. 

“Floyd,” he said when I was done, “pass the ketchup.” I guess he’d been thinking about food and not the blessings of the day. I counted it a blessing that the food I’d got at Maudie’s didn’t have to be eaten alone and that it came with two friends instead. I’m still not sure that either one of them sees that the same way I do. 

I told them I planned to release the red-tailed hawk on Saturday and they were welcome to come see it happen if they liked. That’s the injured bird Jack brought me a few months ago. Back then I didn’t know him except that he was the one person Ennis talked about as we worked around the ranch, when he talked at all. I wonder if Ennis realized that. I bet he had no idea how his voice changed when it was Jack’s name he was letting out. Holy Mother, Ennis would turn red and disappear into the ground if he knew. 

So back when Jack showed up out of the blue with the hawk, I already had guessed that Ennis’s friend was maybe more than a friend. You’re aware, I try to be more open-minded than most. Maybe it’s the years passing, or maybe it’s how hard it is being a recovering alcoholic, but I try to accept folks as they are and make no judgments. I was surprised when Jack told me he worked over in Cimarron, and it wasn’t hard to guess that Ennis and Jack were sharing that house on County Road 19. I remember I thought Ennis was maybe a darn sight more courageous than I’d given him credit for. It’s not easy, the path they’re on. People might accuse me of being a Pollyanna, and I try to take it as a compliment when they do, but my eyes aren’t closed to the ills of the world. I see the light and the darkness too. 

Anyway, after Jack and I got the hawk settled in the big cage I have out back, we kept talking as Jack helped me with my chores around the place. It can mean a lot of work, caring for the animals people leave with me or sometimes just dump in my yard, but I don’t mind. Being outdoors, being with animals, it’s good for a man. Jack said he might come back for a dog someday, if I had a good one that was ready to leave me. “Nothing small and yappy,” he said. Though isn’t that a thought that makes you grin, imagining Ennis sitting in the nice chair they have in the living room with a fluffy Pomeranian curled on his lap? Hmmm. On second thought .... Well, Davey sure fits in his lap well enough.

Now Jack, I see him as a Lab man, with a sleek black dog who would love him the way only dogs can fiercely love. The dog would run on command so far and so fast with the flick of Jack’s hand but would always circle back to him because the dog couldn’t imagine life without his master. Of course, really what I’m thinking of is a mongrel, the great American dog, but one that’s along Labrador lines. A black one or a gold one, you know the type. 

Jack gave me cash for the hawk’s care, which I thought was good of him. It was only later, of course, that I met Ennis and Jack together, when Ennis was willing to say out loud what I had already seen in Jack’s eyes and heard, before, in Ennis’s voice. But people these days, I find, don’t always look and don’t always hear, not deeply enough. The world is too much with us. Who said that, do you know? Doesn’t seem like the bible. Maybe Shakespeare. But whoever it was, I agree. We all need to slow down and pay attention. To truly live life and not let it run over us.

I was glad when Ennis jumped right in at the dinner table and said he’d come see the hawk fly again, like he wouldn’t miss it. Jack said hey, he thought it was his hawk. Ennis shrugged and said maybe Jack had forgot, but he’d been there for the rescue that night too. Jack said, says you, and then he told me he’d be there too. 

The bird should have been well enough to fly weeks ago, but it hasn’t happened. I don’t know why. I’m a big believer in animals telling me when they are healthy and ready to go on with their lives, but it truly is way past this bird’s time. 

I left them right after we finished eating, with Jack waving at me friendly as can be and saying, “So long, Floyd,” before going back to washing the dishes. Ennis walked with me to the door and said “Thanks for coming over,” in that mumble he sometimes uses. But I heard what he said and what he meant by it too. Made me feel good. 

That’s really why folks help other folks, you know. It’s not from some high-sounding altruism, but because it makes the helper feel good. That’s how it works for me, anyway.

I drove carefully through the dark, but it’s not that far to my house on Huggins Road. When I got out in my own driveway, I didn’t go to feed the animals right away. I stopped and looked up. 

It was beautiful. You would have thought so too, even if you’re one of those folks who stay in your house all the time and don’t indulge yourself in the wonders of the night sky. Try it sometime soon. Take a look at the stars showing themselves one by one, pinpoints of what is right and good. 

And then look at the land. I saw the ripples and folds of the Moreno Valley as shadows that seemed to rise and fall, like the land itself was breathing.

This is my home. Maybe my Indian ancestors camped here, singing the chants that bound them to the earth. Maybe right where I was standing had been a place of gathering and ceremony. I could almost see Mount Wilson and Baldy Peak as they rose up on either side of me. They might have been sacred to my people. There is so much I don’t know. 

I do know the valley lets me live in a different way than I had when I was younger. I came here to rebuild my life after my son Wiley was killed in Vietnam. It was after I buried my despair in the whiskey bottle for four long years, after my sister Maria wouldn’t give up on me and urged me to try AA, after I rescued myself with their help and found the strength to keep living. I’m not the fast-talking, hard-driving salesman anymore, moving around all the time, hardly knowing what town I was in, always selling, selling, selling, wanting more money, and giving away everything I was for it. 

No, not any more. Here in this special place, this valley between the mountains, is where I know the land and the people, be they lovely or cantankerous or hidden. This place healed me, and this is where I will stay until I die. I don’t know how many more years I’ll have, but even when I pass, all of this will go on. It takes a very long time for the mountains to wear down. 

One of my outdoor cats curled around my ankles then, and I heard the donkey out back scratching against the fence. I laughed at myself a little. I’ve been told a time or two that I’m a pompous old ass. Maybe that’s true. But I whistled when I started the evening feeding, and isn’t that a good thing? 

Such a good day. 

*****


End file.
